Royal Blue Grocery, City of Austin unite in new program

The City of Austin has initiated a new pilot parking program that will allow one downtown Austin business to convert parking spaces into storefront patio space. Other businesses throughout Austin may follow suit in 2013, should the program be deemed successful by city staff next summer.

On March 22, the Austin City Council voted to allow Royal Blue Grocery, 609 Congress Ave., to convert two parking spaces along Congress Avenue into patio space. The conversion will give Royal Blue Grocery approximately 500 square feet of additional outdoor space, according to co-owner Craig Staley.

Staley said he worked with Austin City Councilman Chris Riley and the Downtown Austin Alliance on the possibility of the parking space conversion and knew that his grocery store chain would be the first business to undertake the measure.

"The problem for us on Congress Avenue is our sidewalk is really small," Staley said. "For our storefront space, we're limited on the number of tables we can get outside. So the idea made sense for us, and we said, 'Yeah, we'll take it on.'"

While Staley is now reviewing construction plans and finalizing the estimated $20,000 construction costs, the city said it will convert a nearby unused Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority airport shuttle stop on Seventh Street into additional parking spots to counteract the loss in parking along Congress Avenue. Robert Spillar, director of the City of Austin Transportation Department, said the block will actually gain parking space with this conversion despite the loss of the two spaces in front of Royal Blue Grocery.

Beginning a program

Royal Blue Grocery will pay rental fees—$100 per month per parking space—to the city while the pilot program is under way. The fee is cheaper than the cost that would normally be assessed to a business that is taking up parking spaces.

During council's March 20 work session, Councilwoman Kathie Tovo said she was concerned about the fees being assessed to Royal Blue Grocery as part of the pilot program. While licensing fees associated with leasing parking spots usually would have cost the company $8,800, the grocer is only being asked to pay an application fee as well as per-month parking space rental fees.

"It is a creative idea and I'm interested in it," Tovo said. "It looks like a benefit to the city to test it as a pilot, but there is clearly a benefit to the business.

According to Spillar, the business is taking on a great risk by serving as the pilot storefront to implement this change. After the pilot testing period is over, if the city finds the program does not successfully enhance the atmosphere of downtown, Royal Blue Grocery will be asked to remove the patio and lose its invested money. Spillar said city staff will monitor the business over the next year and report back to council as the pilot program is ongoing to review its outcomes, and the fees for Royal Blue Grocery have also been lowered to accommodate its construction costs. If the program should become permanent, the fees would resort to their higher normal cost.

"There is significant risk we're asking the private owner to make in this investment, to try something along with this that we don't know if, as a city, it will be a permanent thing in a year," Spillar said. "So taking that into notion, we thought about the construction costs that they might have to go into, and we thought this was a reasonable partnering level."

Receiving criticism

Meanwhile, business owners on the same block expressed concern about the loss of those parking spaces, including Bill Koen of Joe Koen & Son Jewelers, which is located next door to Royal Blue Grocery.

Koen said his business has been at that location for 40 years, and as a key stakeholder, he was not consulted by the city about the pilot program.

"Parking and lack thereof has been the single biggest issue to maintaining a viable business downtown since the 1980s," Koen said. "Although it will be a benefit to Royal Blue Grocery, it will be a determent to my business and the rest of the businesses on the block."

If the program is successful, other Austin businesses may also opt to construct patios of their own. But for now, the storefront will serve as the sole example of the pilot project until the city reviews the program next summer.

Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell said the city will pay close attention to the issue of parking throughout the course of the pilot program.

Staley said he hopes to have the patio complete by this summer.

Replicating parketlets

City leaders cited the work done in other cities, such as San Francisco and New York City, to establish park-themed downtown spaces when discussing the parking-space-to-patio conversion at Royal Blue Grocery. Both of the larger cities have already introduced these spaces—which they call parklets—into their urban centers. Parklets are communal social areas built on excessively wide streets or roadways. Some of these projects have been constructed by simply painting or treating the asphalt, placing safety barriers and installing removable tables and chairs.